Using Pinch Media Analytics in PhoneGap

Getting close to finishing up an app for a client in the coming weeks, my business partner and I decided it would be a good idea to include some analytics code so we could track how people are using our application. We ended up using Pinch Media’s Analytics to do our tracking. It came down to this: their code is REALLY easy to implement, and they provide us with just enough information to satisfy our curiosity. I think one of the biggest draws is that it records information regardless of the user’s online status – meaning offline app usage information is stored to a small database and then uploaded once the user reconnects. Had we used a web-based solution, which would have been natural given the nature of PhoneGap (the underpinning of our application) being UIWebView, we would have missed out on some details without considerable work-arounds to cache data as Pinch Analytics does.

Because PhoneGap is essentially a single view application that displays web pages, you are a bit limited with the extent that you can integrate Pinch Analytics out of the box… unless you use javascript callbacks to Objective-C within PhoneGap. That’s not the point of this post. The point is that you just need to follow Pinch’s instructions and you will have analytics data reported back to you within a few hours.

Moving forward, I’m likely to investigate some of the finer points of creating my own PhoneGap callback functions so I can embed Pinch Analytics Beacon methods, which are nice little ways to record information about discreet actions taken within your app – recording leader board views, for example.